Cecil Beaton

Photographer + Interior Designer + Illustrator

Male

BornJan 14, 1904

DiedJan 18, 1980

NationalityBritish

Other NamesCecil Walter Hard...

Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton, CBE was an English fashion and portrait photographer, diarist, painter, interior designer and an Academy Award-winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre. He was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1970.… Read More

News + Updates

'LONDON — To call your own fashion show a car crash would seem a risky business. But what about an inspiration of a crushed metallic Cadillac on a field of vividly colored flowers among the exotic fish in the Pacific Ocean? Fantastic, fabulous and totally original! The last day of the London women’s summer 2012 season opened with the'

'Dates and touring sites are subject to change. SEPTEMBER THE ART OF DISSENT IN 17TH-CENTURY CHINA: MASTERPIECES OF MING LOYALIST ART FROM THE CHIH LO LOU COLLECTION Landscape paintings and calligraphies from a private collection highlight the traumatic collapse of the Ming dynasty. Through Jan. 2 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan; (212)'

'In anticipation of “Cecil Beaton: The New York Years,” a show opening next month at the Museum of the City of New York , the New York Design Center and 1stdibs will host a pop-up preview, “Cecil Beaton and the 1930s,” on the center’s 10th floor, starting on Friday. Organized by Donald Albrecht and Phyllis Magidson,'

'CECIL BEATON produced a torrent of work, not unlike Andy Warhol and Takashi Murakami, who collaborated with Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton. In a new book, ''''Cecil Beaton: The New York Years,'''' Donald Albrecht suggests that his methods of working in a variety of media, his blurring of the lines between art and commerce, and his promotional skills made'

Timeline

CHILDHOOD

1904Birth
Beaton was born on 14 January 1904 in Hampstead the son of Ernest Walter Hardy Beaton (1867–1936), a prosperous timber merchant, and his wife Etty Sissons (1872–1962).
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His grandfather, Walter Hardy Beaton (1841–1904), had founded the family business of Beaton Brothers Timber Merchants and Agents, and his father followed into the business. Ernest Beaton was also an amateur actor and had met his wife, Cecil's mother, when playing the lead in a play. She was the daughter of a Cumbrian blacksmith named Oldcorn who had come to London to visit her married sister. It is through this connection that Cecil is related to the Blessed Father Edward Oldcorne who was involved in the Gunpowder Plot. They had four children — in addition to Cecil there were two daughters Nancy (1909–99) and Baba (1912–73), and another son Reggie (1905–33).<br /><br /> Nancy married Sir Hugh Smiley (1905–90) and Baba married Alec Hambro.<br /><br /> Cecil Beaton was educated at Heath Mount School (where he was bullied by Evelyn Waugh) and St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, where his artistic talent was quickly recognised. Both Cyril Connolly and Henry Longhurst report in their autobiographies being overwhelmed by the beauty of Beaton's singing at the St Cyprian's school concerts. When Beaton was growing up his Nanny had a Kodak 3A Camera, a popular model which was renowned for being an ideal piece of equipment to learn on. Beaton's nanny began teaching him the basics of photography and developing film. He would often get his sisters and mother to sit for him. When he was sufficiently proficient, he would send the photos off to London society magazines, often writing under a pen name and ‘recommending’ the work of Beaton. Read Less

TWENTIES

192521 Years Old
Beaton left Cambridge without a degree in 1925, but only coped with salaried employment in his father's timber business for eight days.
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His brother Reggie however entered the business and remained until his death in October 1933.<br /><br /> For fifteen years between 1930 and 1945, Beaton leased Ashcombe House in Wiltshire, where he entertained many notable figures.<br /><br /> In 1948 he bought Reddish House, set in 2.5 acres of gardens, approximately 5 miles to the east in Broad Chalke. Here he transformed the interior, adding rooms on the eastern side, extending the parlour southwards, and introducing many new fittings. Greta Garbo was a visitor. The upper floor had been equipped for illegal cock-fighting at the beginning of the 20th century but Beaton used the cages as wardrobes to store the costumes from his set design of My Fair Lady. Read Less

192723 Years Old
Beaton designed book jackets and costumes for charity matinees, learning the professional craft of photography at the studio of Paul Tanqueray, until Vogue took him on regularly in 1927.
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He also set up his own studio, and one of his earliest clients and, later, best friends was Stephen Tennant; Beaton's photographs of Tennant and his circle are considered some of the best representations of the Bright Young People of the twenties and thirties. Read Less

193127 Years Old
He was a photographer for the British edition of Vogue in 1931 when George Hoyningen-Huene, photographer for the French Vogue traveled to England with his new friend Horst.
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Horst himself would begin to work for French Vogue in November of that year. The exchange and cross pollination of ideas between this collegial circle of artists across the Channel and the Atlantic gave rise to the look of style and sophistication for which the 1930s are known. Read Less

THIRTIES

193834 Years Old
Beaton is best known for his fashion photographs and society portraits. He worked as a staff photographer for Vanity Fair and Vogue in addition to photographing celebrities in Hollywood. However in 1938, he inserted 'some tiny-but-still-legible anti-Semitic phrases (including the word 'kike') into American Vogue at the side of an illustration about New York society.
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The issue was recalled and reprinted at vast expense, and Beaton was fired.'<br /><br /> Beaton's first camera was a Kodak 3A folding camera. Over the course of his career, he employed both large format cameras, and smaller Rolleiflex cameras. Beaton was never known as a highly skilled technical photographer, and instead focused on staging a compelling model or scene and looking for the perfect shutter-release moment.<br /><br /> Beaton often photographed the Royal Family for official publication. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother was his favourite Royal sitter, and he once pocketed her scented hankie as a keepsake from a highly successful shoot. Beaton took the famous wedding pictures of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (wearing an haute couture ensemble by the noted American fashion designer Mainbocher).<br /><br /> During the Second World War, Beaton was initially posted to the Ministry of Information and given the task of recording images from the home front. During this assignment he captured one of the most enduring images of British suffering during the war, that of three-year-old Blitz victim Eileen Dunne recovering in hospital, clutching her beloved teddy bear. When the image was published, America had not yet officially joined the war - but splashed across the press in the US, images such as Beaton’s helped push the American public to put pressure on their Government to help Britain in its hour of need. Read Less

FORTIES

194642 Years Old
After the war, Beaton tackled the Broadway stage, designing sets, costumes, and lighting for a 1946 revival of Lady Windermere's Fan, in which he also acted.
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His most lauded achievement for the stage was the costumes for Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady (1956), which led to two Lerner and Loewe film musicals, Gigi (1958) and My Fair Lady (1964), both of which earned Beaton the Academy Award for Costume Design. Read Less

LATE ADULTHOOD

197066 Years Old
He also designed the period costumes for the 1970 film On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.
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Additional Broadway credits include The Grass Harp (1952), The Chalk Garden (1955), Saratoga (1959), Tenderloin (1960), and Coco (1969). He is the winner of four Tony Awards.<br /><br /> He also designed the sets and costumes for a production of Puccini’s last opera Turandot, first used at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and then at Covent Garden.<br /><br /> He also designed the academic dress of the University of East Anglia.<br /><br /> Cecil Beaton was also a published and well-known diarist. In his lifetime six volumes of diaries were published, spanning the years 1922 - 1974. Recently a number of unexpurgated diaries have been published. These differ immensely in places to Beaton's original publications. Fearing libel suits in his own lifetime, it would have been foolhardy for Beaton to have included some of his more frank and incisive observations. Read Less

197268 Years Old
He was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours 1972.
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Two years later he suffered a stroke that would leave him permanently paralysed on the right side of his body. Although he learnt to write and draw with his left hand, and had cameras adapted, Beaton became frustrated by the limitations the stroke had put upon his work. Read Less

197672 Years Old
As a result of his stroke, Beaton became anxious about financial security for his old age and, in 1976, entered into negotiations with Philippe Garner, expert-in-charge of photographs at Sotheby's.
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On behalf of the auction house, Garner acquired Beaton's archive - excluding all portraits of the Royal Family, and the five decades of prints held by Vogue in London, Paris and New York. Garner, who had almost singlehandedly invented the photographic auction, oversaw the archive's preservation and partial dispersal, so that Beaton's only tangible assets, and what he considered his life's work, would ensure him an annual income. The first of five auctions was held in 1977, the last in 1980.<br /><br /> By the end of the 1970s, Beaton's health had faded. Read Less

In January 1980, he died at Reddish House, his home in Broad Chalke in Wiltshire, at the age of 76.
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The great love of his life was the art collector Peter Watson, although they were never lovers. He had relationships with various men. He also had relationships with women, including the actress Coral Browne, the dancer Adele Astaire, and the British socialite Doris, Viscountess Castlerosse.<br /><br /> Major exhibitions have been held at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1968 and in 2004.<br /><br /> The first international exhibition in thirty years, and first exhibition of his works to be held in Australia was held in Bendigo, Victoria from 10 December 2005 to 26 March 2006.<br /><br /> In October 2011, the BBC's Antiques Roadshow featured an oil portrait by Beaton of rock star Mick Jagger, whom Beaton meet in the 1960s. The painting, originally sold at the Le Fevre Gallery in 1966, was valued for insurance purposes at £30,000.<br /><br /> An exhibition celebrating The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and showing portraits of Her Majesty by Cecil Beaton, opens in October 2011 at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle. Read Less

He remained at the house until his death in 1980 and is buried in the churchyard.
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In 1947, he also bought a townhouse at number 8 Pelham Place in London. Read Less